"Eating on the Wild Side: The Missing Link to Optimum Health"

Buying local and frequenting farmers' markets continue to be very popular pursuits, and for obvious reasons. But what's the best strategy for navigating the produce section of your average supermarket? Our guest on ST is Jo Robinson, an investigative journalist who lives (and often "grows her own") on Vashon Island, Washington, and who specializes in science and health. Robinson is the author or co-author of more than a dozen books, and the latest title, just out in paperback, is "Eating on the Wild Side: The Missing Link to Optimum Health" (which the foodie website Epicurious.com has called "the next 'Omnivore's Dilemma'"). As was noted of this book in The Washington Post: "Because recent studies have taught us that we should be getting our beta carotene and other health-builders not from pills but from well-grown food, this book is just what gardeners and cooks need." And further, per a critic writing for Booklist: "For some, locavorism isn't enough. Farmed food of any sort lacks the full panoply of flavors and textures that wild foods bring to the table. Moreover, wild foods offer some nutritional advantages and may be richer in some vitamins and minerals than their cultivated cousins. Some laboratory studies have concluded that medical benefits, including protection from cancer cells, can be found in vegetables such as brussels sprouts. Despite her impassioned advocacy for eating foods culled from woodlands and creek beds, Robinson is not so doctrinaire as to believe that everyone has the time or the access to such foods. So she offers a guide to buying the best, most flavorful produce in supermarkets. Robinson guides readers through ranks of greens, explaining how to judge lettuces by color and why to select loose spinach rather than the bagged variety. Such guides can benefit grocery shoppers who lack the means of foraging their dinners."

Related Content

Our guest is James Peterson, the James Beard Award-winning food writer, cookbook author, photographer, and cooking teacher who started his career as a restaurant cook in Paris in the 1970s. He's written more than a dozen cooking guides and recipe books over the years, including "Sauces," "Fish & Shellfish," "Meat: A Kitchen Education," and "Cooking." His newest book, just out, is called "Done.: A Cook's Guide to Knowing When Food Is Perfectly Cooked," and Peterson joins us today to discuss this volume.

On this edition of ST, we speak by phone with Jayson Lusk, who holds the Willard Sparks Endowed Chair in the Agricultural Economics Department at Oklahoma State University. Lusk has a new book out called "The Food Police: A Well-Fed Manifesto About the Politics of Your Plate." Here are a few sentences from the book's opening pages: "A catastrophe is looming. Farmers are raping the land and torturing animals. Food is riddled with deadly pesticides, hormones, and foreign DNA. Corporate farms are wallowing in government subsidies.

When critics of industrial agriculture complain that today's food production is too big and too dependent on pesticides, that it damages the environment and delivers mediocre food, there's a line that farmers offer in response: We're feeding the world.

It's high-tech agriculture's claim to the moral high ground. Farmers say they farm the way they do to produce food as efficiently as possible to feed the world.

In his book Spontaneous Happiness, Dr. Andrew Weil writes of an 'integrative' approach to mental health, warding off mild and moderate depression with an anti-inflammatory diet, exercise and activities such as yoga and meditation, rather than antidepressants.

The millions of Americans who make New Year's resolutions to lose weight often have pictures in mind.

They're pictures that have been repeatedly supplied by the health and beauty magazines at supermarket checkout lines. They feature skinny models in bikinis, or toned guys with six-pack abs, and captions about how you could look like this by summer.

Some people go so far as to tape these pictures onto their refrigerators and cupboards. When they're tempted to reach for a cookie, they reason, the sight of that toned model might dissuade them from breaking their resolutions.

We do not know if Trevor Runyon will like the food in jail. But at least, by the time he got there, he was very well fed. Police say Mr. Runyon slipped into a supermarket and waited for it to close. Surveillance cameras show he then had a feast. He cooked and ate six steaks and washed them down with beer, shrimp and birthday cake. Once he was done, police found him hiding in the ceiling and 57 empty whipped cream cans were in the trash.

Somewhere between a food pantry and a traditional grocery store lies an opportunity to help feed those in need.

Enter "social supermarkets," a European model that offers discounted food exclusively to those in poverty. The stores have grown in popularity across the continent, and this week, the U.K. opened its first. Dubbed Community Shop, the store is located in an impoverished former mining town in South Yorkshire.